Wednesday, April 6, 2016

“The Way of the Transgressor is Hard”: Friday Afternoon Executions in the Army of the Potomac, Part 1.

In 1863, between June and December, the Army of the Potomac executed
thirty-three men for the crime of desertion. These were the first deserters
executed by the Union’s most illustrious army, and their deaths represented an important turn in its storied history. If the Yanks did not know it before, by the end of December, they understood clearly the message their commanders wanted them to receive. The Civil War was serious business, serious enough to end the mercy informally doled out to those men who swore Oaths of Allegiance and then backed out before seeing them through.Of course, military executions were not entirely unknown to the bluecoats. They had been utilized by U.S. forces since the founding of the
country, and during the first two years of the war, April 1861 to April 1863,
the War Department sanctioned the execution of twenty-seven Union
soldiers. However, all of these men were charged with crimes other than
desertion: murder, theft, mutiny, and rape. Even so, of these twenty-seven
executions, only five of were conducted by the Army of the Potomac. To see a
soldier killed by his comrades as a matter of military justice was a rare thing
for that particular army.

That is, until June 1863.

It was a low point for Abraham Lincoln, who normally approached matters
of military justice with a kind, merciful hand. In the past, accused deserters who faced the
death penalty usually received a Presidential pardon through a hand-written
appeal. (In fact, even as late as June 4, Lincoln pardoned three deserters belonging to the 146th
New York who were scheduled to be shot to death.) However, the summer of 1863 changed
Lincoln’s optimistic demeanor. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign was stalled, the Army of the Potomac was reeling from its defeat at
Chancellorsville, and the Copperheads were mounting a tour-de-force in the
coming state elections. With a manpower draft set to go into effect in July and
desertions daily on the rise, Lincoln decided to take a step back,
yielding to pressure from his generals who urged him not to the pardon the next
batch of convicted deserters. The army had to show its enlisted ranks that, once sworn to service, they could not back out.

Thus, in June 1863, as the Army of the Potomac unexpectedly made its
way north in pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the men in
the ranks witnessed something that they had never seen before: soldiers
executed for the crime of leaving the army at will—abandoning their comrades in arms—before
their term of service had expired.

This and the next five posts intend to examine six clusters of executions. The first
“batch” of condemned men consisted of four privates executed in mid-June. The
executions occurred on two successive Fridays: June 12 and June 19. On these
two days—and for the remainder of the war—the Army of the Potomac executed its
condemned men on Fridays only—and only in the afternoon.

The first man to face capital punishment for desertion was Private John
P. Woods of Company F, 19th Indiana. Woods was a likely candidate,
considering that he had deserted twice within the previous six months, and when he was arrested for the second time, Union soldiers apprehended him
while he was wearing an enemy uniform.

Woods faced his first court-martial after the Battle of Fredericksburg; he had fled his regiment and did not
return to it until January 31, 1863, an absence of seventy-four days. At his
trial, he presented a capable defense, one that flummoxed the prosecution,
and after several hours of testimony, he found was “not guilty.” However, Woods
did not escape prosecution after his second arrest. Before the Battle of
Chancellorsville, he again fled his regiment, procured a Confederate uniform, and
after the battle, he attempted to turn himself in to Union pickets by claiming to
be a Confederate deserter seeking asylum. His story made little sense to the
Union officers who interrogated him, and it wasn’t long until they identified
him as a deserter from the renowned Iron Brigade. Woods faced his second
court-martial on May 29. He pleaded “guilty” but begged for mercy based on
conscientious principle:

I cant fight. I
cannot stand it to fight. I am ashamed to make the statement, but I may as well
do it now as at any other time. I never could stand a fight. I never could bear
to shoot at any body. I have done my duty in every way but fight. I have tried
to do it but cannot. I am perfectly willing to work all my lifetime for the
United States in every other way but fight. I have tried to do it but cannot. .
. . I am willing to do all I could for my country. I like it as much as anybody
does. I was always willing to try to fight for my country, but I never could. I
am willing to try to fight for it again. I am ashamed of my conduct and will
always try to do better hereafter.

Woods’s contrition did not sway the court, and after due deliberation,
it declared him guilty and sentenced him to be “shot to death with muskets” at
a time and place approved by the army commander, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. Upon receiving the summary of the conviction, Hooker
immediately returned an order that instructed the divisional commander, Maj.
Gen. James Wadsworth, to carry out the execution between the hours of noon and
4 P.M. on Friday, June 12.

As it turned out, Wadsworth’s division happened to be on the move when
that day came along. At the time, the division was traveling along the road
between Bull Run and Deep Run. When 2 P.M. came, Wadsworth ordered the column
to halt, and he instructed the Iron Brigade to form into square and conduct the
execution. The brigade formed three sides of the square and put a firing
party of eight men in the middle. A sergeant’s guard conducted Private Woods—who
had been sitting atop his own coffin, which had been carried inside an
ambulance for the past five days—to the open side of the square. The sergeant
shackled him and then turned over the proceedings to Lieutenant Clayton Rogers,
the divisional provost marshal, who applied the blindfold.

The swiftness of the whole affair caught one observer off guard.
Chaplain Joseph H. Twichell, who normally belonged to the 3rd Corps,
had been traveling with Wadsworth’s division for the past few days. He
recollected that, at the time of the execution, Woods had been without a minister
of the faith. (Apparently, the chaplain assigned to him—who was from the 7th
Wisconsin—could not be found.) Twichell wrote,
“I had by this time perceived to my amazement that no clergyman was with the
man. . . . Yet to me it seemed hard that the poor fellow was left to pass
through the fearful trial alone—that some friend should not have been
with him to sympathize with him, at least, during his last earthly day, and
help him meet his fate like a man.” Despite his misgivings, Twichell could not
force himself to intervene or offer up any sort of final prayer: “Still I had
no thought of visiting him myself, because he was not of my own part of the
army, and I felt my blood chill at the bare idea.”

At the insistence of the corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Reynolds, who
wished to “have the affair hurried up,” Lieutenant Rogers delivered the
commands, “Ready, Aim, Fire!” and eight muskets went off. Four balls struck
Woods, toppling him over onto his coffin. Despite the damage caused by the lead projectiles, Woods survived the first volley. (As we will see in future
posts, this problem repeated itself over and over as the year went on—failure to
kill the accused quickly and cleanly.) Lieutenant Rogers called two members of
the reserve firing party to advance to within three feet of Woods. On his command, they shot him
in the head, blasting his skull into fragments. At that, the surgeon
pronounced him dead. One officer remembered, “We left the men digging his grave
and resumed the march as if nothing had happened.”

The soldiers of the Iron Brigade felt mixed emotions about what they had
seen. Although some approved the execution as a necessary recourse, few of them felt
good about it. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes, who, incidentally, had been ordered to select the eight men
assigned to the firing squad, wrote to his fiancée, “The men, I assure you,
dislike to be called upon for such a duty. . . . All fire at the dropping of a
white handkerchief, each, in mercy, aiming at a vital part and each hoping that
his is the blank cartridge with which one musket is charged.”

Although Woods’s death was the most infamous of the summer executions, his was not the only
one to happen during the Gettysburg Campaign. A lesser-known set of executions
occurred on June 19 at Leesburg, Virginia. The condemned men were:

·Private William Grover, Company A, 46th
Pennsylvania

·Private William McKee, Company A, 46th
Pennsylvania

·Private Christopher Krubart, Company B, 13th
New Jersey

Like Woods, all three men were veteran soldiers. The two men who
deserted from the 46th Pennsylvania, Grover and McKee, had deserted
together. Grover was eighteen-years-old when he enlisted on August 21, 1861. McKee
was nineteen-years-old when he enlisted five days later, on August 26. Grover was a butcher and
McKee was a shoemaker. Both men lived in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. Although
they had fought with their regiment for almost two years, they deserted it
near Stafford Court House on June 4, 1863. They purchased civilian clothes in
an attempt to fool Union scouts, but they were caught and arrested near Aquia
Creek.In only a few hours, their
courts-martial found them guilty and sentenced both to death. Major General Hooker
approved the sentencing on or about June 7. The third soldier, Krubart, who was
thirty-six, had deserted his regiment in 1862, and although he could have
availed himself of President Lincoln’s blanket pardon for deserters issued back
in April 1863, Krubart refused to come forward. Authorities arrested him near
his home in New Jersey and sent him back to the army. Once there, a
court-martial found him guilty and sentenced him with death. According to Hooker’s
orders, Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, the commander of the 1st
Division, 12th Corps, to which all three men belonged, had to carry
out the execution between the hours of noon and 4
P.M.

When the appointed hours arrived, it was clear and sunny.
According to orders, Maj. Gen. Henry Slocum called out the entirety of the 12th
Corps. He decreed that all 9,000 men had to witness the executions. According to Williams, he selected
the spot well, a piece of land that resembled an amphitheater.
The burial detail dug all three graves on a slight depression, two feet apart,
facing a gentle swell where the observing troops could stand and watch the
proceedings with no obstructions. According to an observer, the execution grounds were on a plot
where the Edwards Ferry Road intersected with the Alexandria Pike. As the Iron Brigade had done one week earlier, the 12th Corps formed into a three-sided box, facing the graves. Three firing squads of eight men each faced the
condemned.

According to all accounts, the execution went flawlessly. The chaplain
of the 60th New York remembered: “They were instantly killed, each
having been pierced by several balls. Their bodies were then placed in the
coffins, and the troops marched past, in column by platoons, giving all an
opportunity to view the corpses. These men were really not such great criminals
as many others who had deserted earlier in the war, and who, on account of
laxity of discipline, escaped punishment. Having, however, disobeyed orders,
and deserted, and hereby incurred the penalty, desertion had become so
frequent, that it had become absolutely necessary to enforce it.”

Brig. Gen. John Geary, another observer, wrote home: “It was certainly
a solemn scene, and one never to be forgotten. Justice to the living requires
some punishment for such crime, ‘Verily, the way of the transgressor is hard.’”
As the Union troops marched North, heading to their date with destiny at
Gettysburg, no doubt all of them hoped they would never see such a terrible scene repeated ever
again.

As we will see in future posts, they were dead wrong.

This sketch, which appeared in Harper's Weekly, depicts the executions of Grover, McKee, and Krubart, the three deserters executed by the 12th Corps at Leesburg on June 19, 1863.